#-What is Bitcoin?**
To those who don’t know what Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is a Peer-2-Peer technology that doesn’t have a central authority or bank. To manage transactions and issuing of Bitcoin is up to the people of the community, like you and me. Its open source which means that no one controls it and everyone can contribute to helping it or partaking in it.
**#-Wallets.****
For you to be able to use Bitcoin you have to have what is called a wallet. It tracks all the Bitcoin transactions and tacks where it goes. Using this reasoning Bitcoin is NOT anonymous but more on that later. To send or receive Bitcoins you need to make a “wallet address,” that would basically be a home address to be able to receive letters in the mail. To make a Bitcoin address you need to go to File->Receiving Addresses->New->Then label that address. It will then generate a useable address under that label. (It is best to have a different address for each transaction because it will be able to see where your Bitcoins are coming from.)
There are many different types of wallets depending on if you want to use it on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, BlackBerry, or IOS. After choosing which wallet is best for you download it and install it. After you boot it up the first time it will make the necessary files and then sync with the Bitcoin Network. This will take a very long time to do but after that you can send and receive Bitcoin.
**#-Bitcoin’s Price****
Bitcoin’s price varies. This means that when you buy Bitcoin it may be worth a different amount when you sell it or donate it. The rise and fall of what Bitcoin is worth kind of works like the stock market with the way it goes up in price and falls down in price (I do not know the exact working of why this happens). One day the Bitcoin community wishes that it won’t fluctuate at all but until that day comes it is NOT recommended that you save very many funds in your wallets and only buy when you need them.
**#-Getting Bitcoin****
To be able to get Bitcoin you have to buy it with real money, gifted it, or earned it buy mining it (Mining Bitcoin will not get you very many Bitcoins anymore without high-end equipment. Mining Bitcoin, at its most basic form, is renting out your hardware to do lengthy equations to determine transactions and other things that I won’t be going over in this guide.) Easiest way to get Bitcoin is buy it from an “exchange” that will exchange Bitcoin for actual money. There are many exchanges that you can go through to get Bitcoin but that is a topic for another day. They are relatively straight forward so I have confidence that all you Voats can figure out how to do that on your own. If not I may be able to help some on how to go about using some exchanges.
**#-Sending Bitcoin****
This is Voat.co’s Bitcoin address: “1PhBpbED6uEnrvy5s9F9axBZbK8fWAezdc” (without the quotation marks.) If you copy and paste that while sending bitcoin to it then the funds (after a couple of hours) will be send to Voat’s admins and be able to put towards running the server and hopefully one day it’s staff. To be able to send Bitcoin, to say Voat, you will go under the “send” tab then enter the address that you wish to send Bitcoin too, enter the amount, and then hit send. Sending Bitcoin is irreversible and will take a fee. If you accidentally send Bitcoin to a wrong Bitcoin address then you are out of luck because you cannot get any of those Bitcoins back.
If I have anything (more than likely) wrong here please tell me and I can edit the post :)
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Wholewit ago
It's not anonymous but pseudo-anonymous. Every Bitcoin transaction sent is recorded on a public ledger so you can see what address sent how much to another. You don't know who owns what addresses though unless person A sends money to person B. Person A will then know the address belongs to person B. This is why you should never reuse wallet addresses. Most wallets creates a new address every time one is used and hides the old one so as not to be reused for this reason.
MadWorld ago
So by never reusing wallet addresses, you can achieve a good level of anonymity without been tracked to your real identity? What about the step where you buy the bitcoins with real money, such as credit cards and bank accounts? Can you also suggest what is the reasonable exchange fee for the currency conversion?
Thanks you!
EngelbertHumperdinck ago
Governments want to be able to track all your financial transactions, so they enact things like KYC (Know Your Customer) laws. These laws require exchanges to collect tons of information about you before their allowed to do business with you. If you were to buy bitcoin in person, for cash or trade, it would be basically impossible to trace unless you were under surveillance.
MadWorld ago
Correct me if I am wrong. The identity of a bitcoin account is only exposed when the exchange of "gov't issued" currency and cryptocurrency takes place. Once that currency exchange is completed, can you anonymize your account by transferring the bitcoins to another account through non-reused disposable wallet addresses?
Also, I didn't know you could buy bitcoins in person. Where do you find such persons to make the exchange and maintain anonymity?
EngelbertHumperdinck ago
If you were to generate a new wallet offline and then transfer the coins into it, there would be no way for anyone to prove you are still in control of the coins. However, let's say later on, you want to purchase something online using those coins and have it delivered to your house, it would be pretty obvious that you just transferred the coins to yourself.
There are also coin mixing services which claim to break (or at least obfuscate) the chain of custody of your coins, for a fee, of course.
If you don't know anyone personally who is willing to trade their bitcoin for your cash, you may find someone here: https://localbitcoins.com. People usually charge more for in-person trades, though. I haven't used localbitcoins yet, myself.
MadWorld ago
It appears localbitcoins.com does have a few local in-person buying option. But it doesn't show the exchange rates.
Since transactions are of public record, are those disposable bitcoin addresses tied to your wallet in publicly identifiable manner? Furthermore, let's say you have WalletA and WalletB, with each one having a collection of sending and receiving addresses. WalletA is used to buy coins relatively anonymously through in-person cash exchange. Then this relatively anonymous WalletA transfers some amount of coins through multiple sender addresses to WalletB's receiver addresses. WalletB is then used to pay purchases, and identity is only exposed when the items are sent to a physical address. If WalletB were to send items to a fake physical address that has nothing to do with your true identity, the owner of WalletB remains hidden. Am I understanding this correctly?
And finally, even if the person of WalletB is exposed to purchases, I think there is a plausible deniability of identity that this person also owns WalletA, where it could be a simple donation to WalletB. WalletB can also claim someone anonymous sent the gifts to said address. No matter how obvious it is, you still need the hard proof.
EngelbertHumperdinck ago
Yes. To the best of my knowledge, everything you have described here is accurate. But please don't take my word for it. I'm far from an expert. I would definitely defer to the mods of this sub.